I can’t believe I’ve missed this: the timeout command of coreutils. It kills a job if it runs longer than a specific time. So if you want to make sure your long_running_job is furnished the next day, when production hours start again:

Ton posted how to increase the NRPE data load to 16k. But if you use Opsview in a distributed environment (got slaves) you also have to adjust NSCA for large output.

That’s quite easy. Patch and recompile nsca-2.7.2 and change the nsca binary on the master and send_nrpe on the slaves. So the now-up-to-16k check results are sent to, and recieved by, the master. Here’s the NSCA-2.7.2 16k patch containing the necessary changes to common.h.

Now you’re able to plot the Nagios configuration with plot-config.pl to compete with others! And it comes in handy to show it off, search for errors or documentation.

plot-config.pl walks through nagios configuration files and draws depencies between hosts (parent-child) and (optionally) shows the services per host. You can plot the graphviz graph bottom-up or left-right and even neato or circo graphs. Though the output is a colored SVG it’s jut a quick & dirty hack.

Of course I run gentoo and I like it to stick to the latest (masked) Gnome version. As it is quite a task to control every package prior to adding it to package.keywords, I worte upgrade_all.

‘upgrade_all’ walks through ‘world’ and finds all packages that would be downgraded on next emerge, shows the according eix-stanza and prompts before adding a stablilizing line to package.keywords. Though it’s a quick shot it works for me, so feel free to edit and extend it, but don’t forget to let me know.

“Participate in Creating a Better World, One Couch at a Time” that the misson statement on couchsurfing.com. I like the idea of offering your couch to travellers and to get in touch with the world right at your home. I appreciate the spirit of all the people out there offering their couch, because i know how preicous an accomodation can be. I invite couchsurfers to lay down their weary head at my couch.